In straw polls, smart money's on Ron Paul

Here’s a pretty safe bet: Ron Paul will win Saturday’s Conservative Political Action Conference presidential straw poll. Or at least he will do better than many better-known and better-financed 2012 Republican presidential candidates.

“In 2007, when the media was all but ignoring Ron Paul’s candidacy we realized that straw polls were something we could win, and they are really about the only way to get Ron Paul any media attention at all. So we just all start showing up,” said Brandon Yates, an activist who has been showing up to straw poll events on Paul’s behalf since 2007.

Of course, the Paul organization lends a helping hand. This year, the congressman’s official Campaign for Liberty reserved blocks of tickets for CPAC and urged supporters to come out. They’ve been at in force at CPAC since Thursday, when they began handing out “Campaign for Liberty” lapel stickers, pitching them as “giving away free liberty.”

But the Campaign for Liberty didn’t pay for supporters’ CPAC tickets. Their top-down efforts have been supplemented — or even surpassed — by a hard-core group of young fans who use the Internet to organize, encourage each other, and lay the groundwork for top finishes in the various straw poll events. The Paul supporters are almost obsessive about the polls, and they have one goal: to get the media’s attention in an attempt to prove Paul is a viable candidate for president.

“It is my goal to get the word out that he can win the presidency in 2012. People already like him, but when they realize he is a serious and viable candidate, the votes will be there. Winning straw polls is a good way to demonstrate this,” said 27-year-old Paul supporter Alan Brown, who belongs to an online Ron Paul forum.

It’s a message that the candidate himself encourages. “I tell my supporters, get into the media! Just think if we had influence in the media,” Paul told POLITICO in a phone interview Thursday.

The results of the grass-roots straw poll efforts speak for themselves: Paul won the 2010 CPAC poll and finished second behind former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in the 2010 Southern Republican Leadership Conference poll — by just one vote. He also placed second in New Hampshire’s WMUR/ABC News straw poll of state Republican Party activists in January.

During the 2008 presidential election, Paul won small straw polls in at least 10 states. He rarely broke into double-digits in the real caucuses or primaries that year, but he would often win by a landslide in the straw polls — he took 4 percent in the Arizona primary, for example, but swept a Phoenix straw poll with 80 percent of the vote.